I focus completely on Audacity in this episode! This time, I share a brief explanation of copyright laws for podcasters, where to get music and sound effects, and three ways to work with background music or sound effects in your podcast.

Insert your music or sound effects into Audacity

Audacity presents three options for inserting audio into an open project: drag the audio file into your project window, or Audio menu > Import > Audio …, or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd-Shift-I (OS X) or Ctrl-Shift-I (Windows). Position your audio where you want it by dragging with the Time Shift Tool (F5) and clip it as necessary.

Adjusting volume with track gain

If you want to adjust the audio’s volume without changing the audio itself (which would be a “destructive edit”), drag or double-click the Gain slider in the Track Control Panel. But this will adjust the volume of everything in the entire track, which may not be your desire.

Adjusting volume with Auto Duck

Audacity contains a handy tool, Auto Duck, for automatically reducing your background audio when you have speaking in another track. This is called “ducking” (because the background audio ducks whenever the there's audio in another track). Before you try Auto Duck, make sure that your background audio is immediate above your vocal track. When you're ready, select the portion of the music that you want to edit (or the whole track, after you're sure you have the right settings), then go to the Effects menu > Auto Duck.

Threshold (default -30 dB) sets when Auto-Duck engages. When the audio in the vocal track (the track directly below your background music) is above the threshold, Audacity will duck the background audio (the audio you selected when you ran Auto-Duck).

Maximum pause (default 1 second) sets how long Audacity will wait before returning the background audio to normal volume. This is the setting responsible for the up-and-down you may hear in background audio while someone is speaking. If you pause for 1 second or longer, Audacity will raise the background audio's volume. This is an important setting to avoid weird ups and downs.

(4–7) Fade length sets how quick the fade down and fade up will be. A small value means a fast fade (default 0.5 second outer fades). Outer is how quickly the background audio fades before and after your vocals, with no overlap. Inner is how quickly the background audio fades during the vocals, at the beginning and end.

As great as this feature is, it makes destructive edits, which you cannot re-adjust later.

Adjusting volume with the Envelope Tool

The Envelope Tool allows you to finely control the volume for each track at any given time, and it does so nondestructively, so you can re-adjust it later on. Select the Envelope Tool (F2) and you'll see some new lines and shading added to your tracks.

Click anywhere on a track to add control points. These are the points where the volume will either start or stop doing something. You need two for ever change: one to start and one to stop. The volume will change between the control points.

Drag one of the inner control points (between the two shades of gray) to amplify the audio (note the dotted blue line on the outside).

Drag one of the outer control points (on the thick blue line) to quiet the audio.

Adding control points allows you to easily fade your music exactly how you want it, without permanently changing your audio. Image it as a little guy who turns the volume up and down every time you tell him.

Fading in or out

Neither the Envelope Tool nor Auto Dock are good for making fade ins or outs. The best way to do that is to clip your audio to the length it needs to be, select some of the beginning for a fade in, or select some of the ending for a fade out, and then select the appropriate command from the Effects menu.

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